DOMANI

Dynamic Observation and Machine learning-assisted profiling for fast Assessment of submicroplastics and Native ecocorona In exposure media

Principal Investigator: Simona Ortelli
Involved Personnel: Anna Luisa Costa
Starting date: 30/11/2023
Duration: 24 months
Total Funding: 239 690,00 €
Call: PIANO NAZIONALE DI RIPRESA E RESILIENZA (PNRR) Missione 4 “Istruzione e Ricerca” – Componente C2 Investimento 1.1, “Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)” PRIN 2022 PNRR
CNR-ISSMC Role: Partner
Project Coordinator: Valentina Marassi (Università degli Studi di Bologna), Simona Ortelli (co-PI)
Consortium: Università degli Studi di Bologna (Valentina Marassi), INRIM (Alessio Sacco), CNR-ISSMC

DOMANI aims at establishing a pragmatic, result-oriented and rigorous approach to achieve two orthogonal objectives.

1) The first is the comprehension of sub-micro plastics (SMP) eco-coronas through profiling, fractionation and quali-quantitative characterization of SMP in the exposure media.
2) The second and most ambitious is the design of modelling approaches to dynamically profile and recognize clean and polluted water/food matrices in fast-result/fast-action mode, creating screening tools based on simpler analyses before resorting to time, money and environment-heavy ones.

DOMANI puts together interdisciplinary expertise to devise matrix-oriented strategies, exploiting analytical, surface and colloidal chemistry and metrology, and benefiting of chemometrics, multiblock analysis and Machine Learning.
Rooted in the synergy with EU projects PlasticsFate and PlasticTrace, and stemming from Italian excellence in research (Academia-UniBO, the National Research Council-ISSMC, and the National Institute of Metrology-INRIM), the involved Units will jointly collaborate to create knowledge and tools for SMP and eco-corona study.
As such, DOMANI aims to contribute to the EU Plastics Strategy goal to reduce the impact of SMP on the environment.